Sinner's test cooking area.

Really nice recipes you have! I plan on trying the ox tongue, since we eat a lot of that here....
Also, you should post some pics of your cooking!

Thanks for the compliment and I hope that you enjoy the ox tongue.

I did consider pics, but sadly I have no camera for it, the one that we had, my mother's, it was stolen when she was out with friends, and my computer doesn't recognize my cell phone, so there is another no go.

Tortillas

Okay this recipe was something that was bothering me for a while, almost a month, and brings me back to the time of truly experimental recipes of my part, since after all it was a brand new recipe that I never tried before and it isn't part of my country's culinary background and we can't get any factory made ones for reference.

It wasn't that hard to get the recipe, I found a couple on the internet and watched some vids on youtube with recipes and references, I followed one of the recipes from a vid and made myself a batch.

Difficulty: Medium, more labor intensive than hard.

Time consumed: Well anywhere between 1 hour to 1 day, after I made the dough I let it rest for 20 min, made one, didn't like the result that much, called it a night and finished rolling the dough and grilling the tortillas today, which much better results after letting it sit overnight outside the fridge, but as far as my references call, it should take around 30 min to finish the dough including resting it, at least another 30 min to roll out, and at least 30 min to 1 hour to grill them all. So anywhere between 1 to 2 hours.


Ingredients:

3 cups of flour, all purpose, normally I would prefer using grams, but I followed the recipe that I was 'given', so measures are in cups.

1/2 table spoon of salt.

1/2 table spoon of baking soda, honestly this one is a bit troublesome, since it might have reacted to the hot water that will be listed later and when grilling the tortillas didn't puff out as in the vids, but still puffed out some, though not all of them did.

1/2 of some sort of solid fat, butter, vegetable shortening, lard, the vids that I watched called it for vegetable shortening, one vid says that shortening can be replaced by butter or lard, I had some lard that I bought a while back to use when baking breads, so I used the lard, use whatever you like or have.

1 cup of hot water, in this recipes vary, some ask for above luckwarm to almost boiling, I went with almost boiling since the two vids that had the most 'confidence' making them used and recomented really hot water.

How to prepare:

Sieve all the dry ingrediens, flour, soda and salt together in a bowl, mixing well the three ingredients, mix in the fat, in my case lard, mix in very well until it becomes a very crumbly dough, I mixed until it had texture of loose sand when not scrunching it together.

Add the hot water and mix with a fork to not burn yourself, mix well and once the water is mostly absorbed mix and knead with your hands, use your hands when it isn't hot enough to burn you, knead until smooth and supple and for three minutes more after it reached that stage.

Now let the dough rest, I covered with a cloth and let it sitting over the fridge overnight, well more than overnight, but 15 to 20 minutes are the minimum, once it is rested cut the dough in roughly similar sized balls, weight if you want to, the size is up to you.

Roll open with a rolling pin, use some plastic wrap to cover the dough, it makes so much easier to roll and move the dough after it is rolled open, again size is up to your own taste and personal limitations, if you have a small skillet then small ones, if you have a huge grill then large ones are posisble, your own skill, taste and limitations is what will dictate the size of your tortillas.

And if you have a tortilla press do use it, I don't so I had to do it the hard way, I plan on making myself a wooden tortilla press to save myself the trouble, but that is for the future.

Now to grilling, heat your skillet or grill until quite hot, some call for screaming hot, the surface must be dry, no oil or anything like that, throw in the tortilla and watch it, when the side not touching the metal forms bubbles/puffs up, you flip it over, press down the bubbles and flip over a couple more times until the tortilla is evenly grilled, the vids say that two minutes or so each side is good, but keep your eyes on it, if the skillet is hot it might burn.

Repeat the process until you are finished, store the cooked tortillas between kitchen cloths to keep warm and moist.

And that is pretty much it, recently I had some tortillas that my mother found in one of those instant stuff, the tortillas came ready, as it came a sauce and a spice mix to throw into some ground beef. It tastes pretty similar, but I am not that sure, I followed the recipe that I got to the letter, other than halving it since the original used 6 cups of flour, with the halved recipe I made around 20 to 30 mediumish to small ones.

I am still due eating them with some filling, I had nothing ready for it, but eating one of them plain tasted pretty good, it wasn't as soft, pliable and wrappable as the import stuff that my mother bought last month, but it surely wasn't bad for a first time, then again they are smaller than the bought stuff.

If any of you try this one recipe and have access to professional made tortillas let me know how close you got of the 'real thing'.

I always email my images from my phone :)

Thanks for that info.. that sounds good coz i cant eat chicken.

Pork rinds or cracklings

Well this isn't a experiemental recipe anymore, as I did it before, once, now as I write I am making it again since I got pork belly rather cheap and this other cut that I bought in the grocery had a nice and thick skin and fat layer, so like the idiot that I am, here I go making them, the idiot part is because the preparation takes lots of time and the fat bursts now and then hitting with painful droplets of hot fat, but they are so damn tasty that they are worth the trouble.

Difficulty: Medium hard, mostly because it is very time consuming and labor intensive.

Time required: Well I guess that at least one hour, never timed it, but takes a while.

Ingredients:

1 kilo or more of Pork belly or skin with fat, it depends mostly of how you like it, I like it with a nice mix of crunchy skin, tasty fat and meat, but it can be done with skin with the fat attached.

Lard, normally the pork belly and skin render a lot of fat, but the lard is needed to deep fry the crackling in the process that I will describe later on, I suppose that vegetable oil can be used, but I learned with lard and I use lard, so lard it goes.

Salt, you need to season it after all.

Vinegar, around one table spoon, this is to remove the porky smell when cooking, it doesn't do anything for the taste.


Required equipment:

Long and strong spoon, metal or wood.

Large pot, prefferably tall too.

Metal strainer, to drain the cracklings.

Skimming laddle.


Preparation:

Get your pork, in my case belly, cut it into pieces roughly the same size, around one inch (2,5 cm) wide by three or four inches (7,5 to 10 cm) long strips, heat the pot well and throw in the pieces of pork, if you can't fit all in the pot you will have to make it in separate batches.
You are cooking out the pork belly, in this part you don't need to grease the pan, just throw the pork in the pot, throw in a pinch of salt and the vinegar, stir well and keep stirring as the pork cooks, this process has two main goals, the first is cook out the water of the pork, the second is to cook out the fat out of the pork, so you can have crispy and dry cracklings, this process is the most time consuming of them all.
Eventually the pork will cook out the fat, leave it in the pan and keep cooking it, the water will also come out, you can add more lard there as well to speed up the process, as another goal of this part of the cooking is to give the cracklings a main cooking and crisping.
Once the pork turns golden brown it will have cooked out most if not all of the water and the fat, the cracklings are nearly done, now you use the laddle and transfer the cracklings to the strainer to dry out the fat, then you take them under a faucet and open the water, washing out the cracklings, that process will make the skin crisp.
Now add more lard to the lard in the pot, heat well and deep fry the cracklings in small batches until it becomes a bright golden brown and they are nice and hard. Strain and drain them well, they should be nice and dry even after the frying, place them into a bowl and add a pinch of salt and mix well to season it.

Now what you have to do is enjoy it with a nice and cold drink.

It is hard, sweaty and hot work, but the cracklings are great, if you like them and you can't find them with ease or they are too expensive, you might as well try making them yourself, that is what I do.

If it ain't much of a hassle to you, would you mind posting some pictures of the food you are cooking? Especially the preparation part.

Okay everyone, I have been given 1 kilo of soy to make tofu by my grandfather, per requests I am thinking about taking pics from the process, just the important parts and do a edit to my tofu post back in back 1, but only if there are interest on pictures of that particular recipe.

On a related note, the next time that I make my new yogurt batch, I will take pictures, not that I think that it needs that much, but since is something that I do rather often it is easy for me to do so, other recipes might or might not get pictures based on the simple fact that I don't make them often, so I can't take pictures of what I don't do.

So here a list of possible updated posts:

Yogurt

Tofu

Stock

Let me know if you want them updated, depending on the response I will post the pics as I make the recipes.

EDIT: Okay you guys got really, really lucky, this weekend I got a lot of stuff on my recipe list to do thanks to my grandfather and some grocery shopping, in which my mother purchased a nice hunk of pork with nice, thick and fat skin, that I made into cracklings, and I took the pictures, I plan on posting the pics on the edited posts for each recipe when I am done with the marathon of stuff to do, which include making stock, right now I am in the middle of the making of tofu/soy milk.

It has been a while since I last posted anything here, I tried out a new recipe and came out great, and I thought on sharing here.

Gyoza, also known as potstickers. With home made skins.

Difficulty: easy, a bit labor intensive though.

Preparation time: between 30 min up to an hour, the dough needs to rest and the process of rolling the skins is the part that takes more time than anything else.

Ingredients:

Skin;

200 grams of flour

10 grams of salt

Boiling water as needed.

Flour to roll it open

Filling;

500 grams of ground pork, well beef or chicken if you want to, but traditionally pork

1 large leek chopped thinly

2 bunches of green onions chopped thinly

1 or 2 cloves of garlic, more or less to taste

100 to 200 hundred grams of Chinese cabbage chopped thinly, up to taste, add more or less depending of how cabbagy you want it to be

Grated or thinly cubed ginger to taste

Roasted sesame oil to taste

Salt to taste

Soy sauce to taste

The usual sauce that my family eats it with

Soy sauce

A small drizzle of roasted sesame oil

Lime or lemon to taste, it has to taste a little lemony but not too much

How to prepare:

Using either a kitchen aid with the dough hook or your hands alongside a solid spoon, add the water to the flour mixed with the salt a little bit at a time, mixing to incorporate the water into the flour and salt mix, adding enough until it forms a soft dough that doesn’t stick to the bowl that you are using. Knead until smooth and let it rest for twenty minutes up to half an hour.

While the dough rest mix the ingredients of the filling until combined, fry a small piece to check for seasoning, it shouldn’t have enough salt to be eaten by itself, given that later it can be eaten with savory sauces, but by itself it should have enough salt and seasoning to be pleasant. Reserve the filling until the dough is ready to be worked.

When the dough is rested roll it into a rope and cut into small balls of a inch or so wide, then roll each ball a millimeter or so thin, likely a bit more, but it should be thin, place a spoon of the filling inside on the middle of the dough disk, or close enough, then fold the edges in front of you like a calzone, then pinch the edges to give the distinct pleat, even if doesn’t get as nice as the ones that you get in a restaurant is okay, repeat the process until you are out of dough.

As with the nikuman it is okay to have some leftover filling or dough, in my case I was left with enough filling to make one or two more regular sized potstickers.

To fry them you need a good, thick bottom non stick pan, you drizzle a bit of oil there and coat the pan after it is nice and hot, then add the potstickers into the pan, not enough to crowd the pan badly, leave some room to move then around a bit so they don't stick to the pan to the point where they tear before unsticking, when ready they shouldn’t stick to the pan.

After a minute or two frying on the skillet you add a drizzle of water, around a finger worth of a water glass to the pan and cover it, letting it steam until the water evaporates. That will cook the parts not touching the pan as well the filling. Once the water is gone you remove the gyoza from the skillet and place them on a plate.

In my family we serve with that simple lime sauce, you either drizzle the sauce over the gyoza or dip it there, I am not sure if others eat it with other sauces.

I am a bit unsure if this recipe handles freezing all that well, I never froze them, but when I was a child we used to buy frozen potstickers from a restaurant and prepare them as needed, they never gave us trouble, so maybe they can take the cold, in any case I made a few that I put in the freezer after cooked, so those should be okay, just nuke them for a while and they should be good to eat.

As for how many you get, well the recipe gave me around 30 regular sized pot stickers, so the numbers should float around 35 and 25 based on how big you make them. I hope that you enjoy this recipe, I know that I did.

[color=#993300]You usually can't freeze 饺子 (thats the form of dumpling I'm assuming you're making, based on the description) too well, as the skins tend to fall apart after reheating after freezing. An additional tidbit, try sprinkling fried onions atop and using one of the more tart dumpling sauces (usually a mix of rice vinegar and soy sauce I think). As for filling, I have a personal preference to mixing Cantonese roast pork with minced shrimp and chives